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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#641

Post by anigbrowl »

mortenjorck wrote: post #494
joshe wrote: post #379

This is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad. I just hate Adobe so much. The nightmare of their installer, the weird store with horrible designs popping up when you activate normal ui stuff, the difficulty in canceling a subscription, and the stasis in their product and ui. Oh and the sloppiness of Lightroom on mac with it's weird ui and that it didn't even import and manage photos well. I've be…

I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, and I was happy to pay the premium prices they asked (though I'd skip versions to save money). When Creative Suite was discontinued, that was a pretty abrupt turn, as I had no interest in a subscription for software I only used for personal projects. And yet, I stayed…

I used to beta test for them. A few months back I took at look at the current version of Audition to see what I'd been missing out on since the days of CS6 nearly a decade ago.

Three things have changed. It now includes one third-party plugin (that anyone could purchase) offering an alternative volume meter - the equivalent of a slightly different color histogram for photo/video software. It offers some new presets with friendlier names, for a feature that already existed. And they unified version numbers with other products. EDIT: Also some bug fixes, but poorly documented and tbh pretty rare edge cases. I still use CS6 in production and bugs are not a source of worry.

That's it. Anyone who has been paying a subscription for this has been getting ripped off wholesale. The product is great - but it was great before Adobe acquired it (when it used to be called CoolEdit) and Adobe actually removed functionality from it along the way, like dumping MIDI support because they didn't want to cater to musicians.

Any designers/engineers that understand or use the product left long ago. A standout example of this in their playlists feature - you can select a bunch of marked regions in a waveform or project and add them to a separate list, where you can rearrange their playback order freely - very useful if you are structuring a radio program or a podcast. Except...once you've found an arrangement you like, you can't do anything else with it. You can't render the audio to a new file, generate a new project, export it, save the list to a text file, or copy it to the clipboard, or anything else. They started building it 10 years ago and then never bothered to finish it.

I don't really think of Adobe as a software company any more. They're IP landlords who spend the bare minimum on integration and maintenance of their properties while continuously jacking up the rent.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#643

Post by anigbrowl »

patcon wrote: post #554
mortenjorck wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, and I was happy to pay the premium prices they asked (though I'd skip versions to save money). When Creative Suite was discontinued, that was a pretty abrupt turn, as I had no interest in a subscription for software I only used for personal projects. And yet, I stayed…

> discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever. I empathize, but isn't all this the reason they would fork out so much for figma? I mean, people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. It's confus…

has never been anything but subscription

Because that's not the same as a bait-and-switch, and because they provided value to subscribers in the form of continuous innovation.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#644

Post by jerrygoyal »

npteljes wrote: post #550
mirzap wrote: post #539

This is really sad :( There are 2 tech companies that I really hate. Whatever they touch they ruin - Oracle and Adobe. On the other hand, there's now a lot of room for other startups to go Figma-way and try to capture market.

I don't see how Oracle ruined Java or MySQL for example.

use of Java has declined over the years. that's a sign.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#645

Post by JoeyJoJoJr »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #237
thomassmith65 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case people are too young to remember, Macromedia was well on its way to matching Adobe's application suite – except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web. There's a good case that Adobe would no longer exist today had Adobe not acquired Macromedia.

I still use Adobe Animate (formerly Macromedia Flash), for simple vector drawings. For example, you can just draw a circle, draw a line through it, delete part of the circle that is bisected on the line, then click and drag the line or the remaining curve to curve those two segments. It's so much easier than using the pen tool or having to deal with vectors in Illustrator.

Same here. I’ve never found a vector editing tool to be as intuitive as Animate/Flash.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#646

Post by papichulo4 »

ginger2016 wrote: post #640
joshe wrote: post #379

This is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad. I just hate Adobe so much. The nightmare of their installer, the weird store with horrible designs popping up when you activate normal ui stuff, the difficulty in canceling a subscription, and the stasis in their product and ui. Oh and the sloppiness of Lightroom on mac with it's weird ui and that it didn't even import and manage photos well. I've be…

I have an adobe subscription, I never heard of Figma. I am sure their product is great, but it is a niche product. Figma is not worth 20B as a standalone company. Adobe will integrate Figma’s technology into Adobe’s suite of products and will make it available to the masses. I say it is a good thing that Adobe is acquiring Figma. Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but…

Heads up, then, it's the de-facto standard in UX / UI design these days. There are alternatives, but this is the go-to tool people are training on, using at work, etc. It's not some unknown tool that's being saved by Adobe out of obscurity.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#647

Post by nicoburns »

alcover wrote: post #520
derefr wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always wondered why an indie app developer hasn't just decided to work their image-editor app up as "the new Fireworks." Many other image-editor apps do now take Fireworks' same non-destructive hybrid editing approach... kind of . But they're always missing one thing or another. Either: 1. they aren't multiplatform (can't get "standard" adoption like Fireworks if you're macOS-only) 2. they don't go far enough with th…

Very interesting. I also regret FW fondly. Your post scratches an itch in me and I may be tempted to work on that. Sorry for my laziness to look it up but could you explain "Fireworks just stored projects as an extension chunk of a PNG file" ?

PNG format has a space for arbitrary metadata. Fireworks stored their proprietary save format inside this, and also rendered the file to flat PNG on save, meaning that you could preview fireworks files in anything that could read PNGs (although the file size would be huge).

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#648

Post by bears-n-beets »

As a current software engineer at Adobe, I was really disappointed when I got the internal email announcing this this morning. It's reminiscent of Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior in the early 00s. Figma is the better product and Adobe knows it - but instead of using that to light a fire under them and work harder to create a better product, Adobe just used its deep pockets to make the problem go away. I was already planning on leaving the company for other reasons but this is the nail in the coffin for me.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#649

Post by lprd »

I was burned by Adobe for the last time a few years ago. Since then, I avoid them like the plague. I loved Figma, but now I will be searching for an alternative. Adobe ruins everything they acquire, and its only a matter of time before Figma follows suit.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#650

Post by mortenjorck »

patcon wrote: post #554
mortenjorck wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, and I was happy to pay the premium prices they asked (though I'd skip versions to save money). When Creative Suite was discontinued, that was a pretty abrupt turn, as I had no interest in a subscription for software I only used for personal projects. And yet, I stayed…

> discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever. I empathize, but isn't all this the reason they would fork out so much for figma? I mean, people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. It's confus…

> people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription

I think a big part of it is exactly that, that Figma's value proposition as a subscription was always clear from the beginning, that it's not just a design tool but a real-time, collaborative design environment. Sketch was always the better choice for solo, side-project work, because it was a one-off purchase with no need for a cloud component (its more recent direction to try to become a cloud-first service has unfortunately only served to highlight its shortcomings versus Figma).

Creative Suite never had a value proposition as a subscription apart from becoming a predictable cost center for businesses. Tacking on an inferior version of Dropbox, making the whole suite subscription-only, and calling it Creative Cloud did a pretty decent job of alienating those who didn't fall into that "predictable cost center" market.

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